#doc reflections

After having completed some amateur-at-best short film documentaries this semester, I decided to switch it all up and make an audio doc for this last project. The product I ended up with was “thanks for the memories,” which is an auditory ode to my grandparents.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me depicts the difficult circumstances experienced by Black people in America. It also compares the different experiences between the older and younger generations. Coates addresses his son in this book and explains how cautious he must be. Growing up Coates had to adapt to trying his hardest to stay alive. The risk of death loomed everywhere and the educational system was not there to help but rather fed into the concept and causes of self-fulfilling prophecy. Early in the book, he tells the story of how he saw his son crying while watching the news, the news that the police officer, who had killed an innocent black man, would go free. Coates, who had become desensitized to such news, must comfort his son, who is witnessing nationwide injustice for the first time in front of his eyes.

Later on in the book, Ta-Nehisi Coates explains how he had gone to college and introduces us to the people he met there, people who we become attached to as readers, people who he explains and regards with such grace and majesty. When he, after many experiences in his life talks about his experience seeing the news story of one of his college friends being shot and killed. It strikes us right in the gut with his immersive and tragic rhetoric. In film, we undergo a very similar experience when we, in Paris is Burning, come to find out that Venus Xtravangza, who we have been getting to know throughout the entire documentary, was murdered, because she was too trusting. We come to know intimately the fear of death that out queer people must have been experiencing daily in those days and in many places today.

in my documentary class, we were asked to create a piece of media that utilized one of three documentary modes: reflexive, participatory, and performative. i decided to make a performative documentary because I felt uncomfortable centering the documentary around anyone else on such short notice since i procrastinated filming it until the last minute. i came home today with an urge to make cookies and watch the BBC TV show doctor who, which is a show I have been watching since my childhood. there was no reason for this urge, as there never has to be. i just did. thus, i started my journey of completing such a mundane activity.

much like supersize me (2004) and faces places (2017), i placed myself in the middle of the documentary to show myself doing something, in order to prove a point. what was my point? the everyday yearning for the past and the romanticization of the past. as i watch a show from my childhood and make cookies with a recipe from my childhood, i am faced directly with the reality that it all may not have been as good as I remember, and likewise, may not have been as bad as I remember.

sadly, the cookies, due to my not having any chocolate chips in my apartment and refusing to go buy nestle chocolate chips because that company sucks in general and it’s a sunday in utah and i still don’t know what is and isn’t open on sundays in utah, didn’t end up being very tasty. on the other side, i never cared much about the ninth doctor in doctor who. he had only one season and was quickly replaced with the beloved tenth doctor, played by david tennant. so, when re-watching the season with the ninth doctor, i was surprised about how much I liked the character. he was brash and brutal in a charmingly honest way. some things age better than other, just like everything else in this world.

i tried to include as many parts as possible with me looking up to the TV, in order to emphasize the connection between my watching Doctor Who and my making chocolate chip cookies. it is a very small documentary all in all and lacks any useful audio because i belief that the piece can stand on visuals alone.

i positioned the bowl in front of the camera, as i was mixing up the dough, in order to represent the “rose-colored glasses” behind which we tend to view the past. the documentary serves to illustrate the discrepancy between reality and our memories. i am also listening to the show via my headphones, which drown out the sounds out the outside, suggesting how we often ignore what others say about our memories and our perception of them. memories are very personal and subjective. reality itself is subjective.

In my opinion, this would be accomplished through observational or participatory mode. These modes can both allow the under-represented subjects to speak for themselves, through interviews with or without the interviewer’s questions being heard by the audience. This decision is largely dependent on how the film is cut together and can be indicative of whether or not the film is participatory or observational. For example, in Paris is Burning, we simply hear the answers the subjects have, and likewise in the film Hoop Dreams.

This allows the audience to feel closer to the subject because it seems as though they are addressing us directly. This way it also leaves some ambiguity about whether or not the filmmaker themselves are part of this under-represented community or not. On the other hand, in Nobody’s Business, the filmmaker’s active involvement in asking questions and dictating the flow of the conversation hints that he is very close to the subject and may have some personal opinions already about the subject matter. Besides, he has skin in the game. Likewise, in Sherman’s March McElwee and his relationships become the subject of the film. Participatory mode can also establish that a filmmaker is indeed unfamiliar with the subject matter, but the audience will be able to tell through one’s questions and tone.

Despite having discussed the difference between observational and participatory documentaries, my assignment for my class was actually to compare participatory with performative documentaries. Personally, I believe it is hard to represent a diverse community through performative documentaries due to the documentary filmmaker’s largely personal involvement and performance in the process. Faces Places explains more about Agnes Varda and JR than about the villages and towns that they visit. Sure, we learn about mining communities and the wives of dockworkers,

but the larger idea of the film, with that idea being Varda and JR traveling around to create art based on the people who live there, greatly overshadows the people they learn about. Not to be crude, but it sometimes seems like they were almost colonizers in areas they don’t know, committing to their bit whether the locals like it or not. Plastering the faces of miners on the brick houses of a largely abandoned but ancient street may seem fine, but it is also changing the historical appearance of the community.

The picture of a woman plastered on a wall in front of her café might seem like a very beautiful gesture, but when the subject states how uncomfortable she gets looking at it, it calls into question if the filmmakers truly care for the well-being of the subjects.

this week, i will be discussing the reflexive and participatory mode of documentary. unfortunately, i was absent for a lot of my classes recently because of various illnesses, but i am doing okay now. the only reason i mention it is because i was unable to watch more documentaries within these modes of documentary. however, i still did the reading and understand these subjects rather well.

both reflexive mode and participatory mode are rather similar in practice, but are different in subject and application. they both consist of the filmmaker participating directly in the filmmaking, affecting what the subjects say and how everything comes across on camera; however where participatory mode focuses on a subject outside of filmmaking, the reflexive mode takes this all a step further, examining not just a particular subject but the very practice of filmmaking itself. interestingly enough, one documentary can be both reflexive and participatory.

such is the case with the previously discussed french film chronicle of a summer. chronicle of a summer has a focus outside of its filmmaking, life in france during the summertime, but the reflexive aspects of the film are of equal importance and consist of a similar runtime as the scenes discussing life. one notable participatory techniques chronicle of a summer uses is the interview, specifically the street interview. a clip of this can be seen in the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL6xHgxw9OY what is particularly interesting about this scene is that before its appearance in the film, a largely reflexive purpose of the film is established. the filmmakers talk to their subject about her part in the film and what their plans and intent for it is, they then send her out to conduct interviews. this discussion can be scene under the following link, among other clips and explanation undercut with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxk-fg771r8 the discussion can be seen at the 0:40 timestamp.

a notable example of a film that is participatory but not reflexive is supersize me, in which the filmmaker puts himself through an experiment to prove a point about the danger of mcdonald’s portion sizes. there is no meta commentary about filmmaking itself, but a critique of american fast food chain’s lack of care concerning human life and health. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9__23-zjhM

as far as reflexive documentaries that aren’t participatory, it is a bit harder to distinguish; however, the film surname viet given name nam does not focus much on its filmmaker, but its filmmaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjkuTAWQ2-E the film makes it clear that the documentary is a blurring between performance and truth, making sure that we are aware that we are watching a show. the subjects are women in vietnam, who the viewer assumes experienced all the tales of abuse that they talk about, but that is not the case. the filmmaker tricks you into trusting the emotions of these women, and then reveals that they were actually actors retelling true accounts of events that happened to completely different women. this demonstrates how some reflexive films will utilize bertolt brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect, which was crafted to demonstrate the audience that a certain play is indeed a play, ensuring that they cannot become lost in its plot. brecht instead wanted the audience to constantly reflect onto their own lives and how what the narrative is telling them can change them.

I filmed this video for my documentary class to utilize the characteristics of the observational mode of documentary filmmaking. This mode is also referred to as cinema verité because it sets out to show as much reality that can truly be depicted through the lens of a camera as possible.

This was shot on Halloween night, when my roommates, a friend, and I were trying to figure out what to do with the night. I wanted to show the scene as casually as possible, to the point that they could forget that I was filming, so I simply took out my phone and started filming. I set out to establish a casual mood like that set forth in the French film Chronicle of a Summer.

To accomplish such a thing, I decided the subject matter would be an intimate, friendly exchange of no exemplary worth to the directional path of humanity. It was a mere peak into the lives of some queer BYU students living in a basement apartment, a mere snapshot.

Without context, you would never know that this was during Halloween, the only indication would be the costumes worn. I wanted to depict the reality of how Halloween celebrations are not always so explicitly themed or decorated, sometimes they are just mild hang outs between friends and roommates. It is an explicitly introverted perspective on Halloween, the taxing brainstorming of what to do before everyone is worn out.

with the advent of film and cinema, many artists had to make a decision. they could either reject the medium or adopt it for themselves. painters and poets were among those affected by this.

Interestingly enough, I actually wrote an essay in college about how the masculine urge to reject film and favor the old school mediums of poetry and novels resulted in the shaping of the german expressionist movement, during which women in germany sought refuge from sexism within the seats of a movie theatre, where objectively emotional and expressive stories were being told and shown.

side note aside, these artists began crafting new ways to tell stories, or rather to document stories. these new films also highlighted subjects that would not have been considered story worthy. one such subject was that of the city. the whole entire city.

With walter ruttmann’s film berlin: symphony of a great city, a new genre or trend was born. Ruttmann depicted berlin as a series of moving parts, which all work together to create that city’s symphony. There is no main subject within this film besides the entire city of berlin. This berlin was a mechanical and technological wonderland, in ruttmann's eyes, a focus which he achieves through his focus on the smaller parts of the city.

Dziga vertov gladly added to the canon of city based documentaries, creating his man with a movie camera, in which vertov offers an intimate look into the lives of those living under early communism. He films a birth, a funeral, a marriage, a divorce, the ins and outs and daily breathings of a lifestyle which we now look upon in wonder, as viewers did with robert flaherty’s nanook of the north. Vertov, leaving now rock unturned, even films his brother/cinematographer and his wife/editor, to reveal the very act of filmmaking itself.

While man with a movie camera could be seen as a love latter to life ina city, then a propos de nice could be seen as a rejection letter. Jean Vigo, sick of the tourists in his resident town of nice, collaborated with dziga vertov’s other brother boris kaufman to create a stinging commentary in the form of silent city documentary. As they film, they find themselves as a magnet for vanity. To have one’s video taken in the 1920s may have been the peek of exposure, thus all the wealthy tourists dancing for kaufman’s camera were exposing themselves. Unlike Ruttmann who focused on objects to depict berlin, vigo focused on the transitory people to depict nice.